Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in New York on 16 October, 1888. His father was an actor and the boy spent the first seven years of his life traveling through the United States with his father's company. During the next six years he attended several Catholic boarding schools, and then spent four years at the Betts Academy (Connecticut). In the fall of 1906 he entered Princeton University, but remained there only one year. During the following fourteen or fifteen months he worked for a mail-order firm in New York, until it failed. He then went off to Honduras on a prospecting expedition, and after some months of hardship got only an attack of malarial fever for his pains. This necessitated his return to the United States, where he was given a managerial position with a theatrical company of his father's which was then on tour. The company's tour ended in Boston. Mr. O'Neill had been reading Jack London, and Joseph Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus, and he now felt impelled to go to sea in a sailing ship. He did so, going on a Norwegian boat to Buenos Aires, where he remained for more than a year, working for various American firms and also shipping on board a cattle boat for a voyage to South Africa and back. After a further period in Buenos Aires, during which he found no work and had no money, he returned to America as a common seaman on a tramp ship. A time of loafing followed, and then again he went to sea, making a couple of voyages as able seaman on vessels of the American Line. Thereafter he was for a while an actor, and then for some months a newspaper reporter, until he was attacked by tuberculosis, which necessitated a half-year in a sanitarium.

It was only after he came out of the sanitarium, in the latter half of 1913, that Mr. O'Neill began to write. During the winter of 1913-1914 he composed a number of plays, and he spent the following winter at Harvard, working under the direction of Professor G. P. Baker. Through the winter of 19151916 he lived in New York, engaged in writing, and in the summer of 1916 he joined the Provincetown Players, and began to act in plays of his own writing which they produced. Since that time he has been engaged entirely in the composition and production of plays, living for some years in Provincetown, and more recently in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He has thus far written some fifty plays, only about one-half of which have been short ones. Twenty of these he has not only discarded as worthless, but has destroyed. Of the remainder many have been successfully produced, and they have made such an impression upon the public that by now Mr. O'Neill is everywhere recognized as a dramatist of genius-really the earliest dramatist of unquestioned genius whom the United States can boast. Were he to cease writing to-day his place would still be secure and memorable, both in the history of the American stage and in American literature. He should, however, have many years of work before him, and those who have studied his plays most closely seem to be agreed that his powers show no sign of exhaustion and that he is likely in the future to give a great fulfillment to the brilliant promise of his first decade as a playwright.

Mr. O'Neill has attained his high position first of all because he has something to say about the character of life which has elements of profound truth in it; and what he has to say is his own, is the fruit of his own experience and reflection, and is felt intensely and intimately. And besides building up in his plays a criticism of life which contains so much of unescapable truth that, whatever our conclusion about it may be, we cannot possibly disregard it but must somehow come to terms with it, Mr. O'Neill has expressed his criticism with great imaginative power, a masterly independence, and a thorough understanding of the nature and limits of theatrical art. He has been a bold experimentalist, but his experiments have been rigidly controlled by the means at his disposal, furnished by modern stage technique, so that some of the most novel of his experiments have at once proved effective and successful when tested by public performance. And perhaps nothing is more notable in Mr. O'Neill's artistry than his severe economy in the use of his material. His economical presentation joins hands with his sense of balance to give to his plays a concentration and directness which, if at times it seems brutally overpowering, also at times makes them seem as inevitable as destiny.

Mr. O'Neill's conviction is that human life is essentially and hopelessly tragic. He appears to discern elements of worth and of fineness in life, and discovers the springs of beauty and ground for sympathy in every honest effort of the understanding to follow the lead of genuine feeling, but concludes that so mixed is human nature and so indifferent are the contending elemental forces which surround man that ultimate defeat in life is inevitable even for the best. He feels that civilization has not improved, but has debased human nature. Built on shams and falsehood, it has produced in the socalled favored classes only qualities which are worthy of contempt. Yet Mr. O'Neill does not find a

cheap escape from this possibly immature conclusion in any sentimental exaltation of savage races He does not pour on them his contempt, it is true, save when they ape the rottenness of modern civilization, but neither does he cherish any sentimental illusions concerning nature and nature's simple children He contents himself with an impartial effort to discover sensitiveness and scrupulousness, the springs of whatever is worthy in human nature, as he feels, wherever they may be brought to the surface by crucial conflicts. And if these very qualities serve in our world but to hasten tragic defeat for the persons who possess them, he is also content simply to leave the enigma bared and insistent, as long as he is able to see no further. Thus, though his criticism of life is individual and independent, its general outcome, pointing towards despair and hopelessness either over life itself or, at least, over present com ditions of life, is in striking accord with a pronounced critical tendency among a number of contemporary American writers in various fields.

Mr. O'Neill's published plays include the following: Thirst, and Other One-Act Plays (1914; the additional plays are The Web, Warnings, Fog, and Recklessness), Before Breakfast (1916), The Moon of the Caribbees and Six Other Plays of the Sea (1919; the other plays are Bound East for Cardif, The Long Voyage Home, In the Zone, Ile, Where the Cross is Made, and The Rope), Beyond the Horizon (1920) Gold (1921), The Emperor Jones (1921), Diff'rent (1921), The Straw (1921), Anna Christie (1922), “The Hairy Ape" (1922), The First Man (1922,) All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), Welded (1924), Desire under the Elms (1924), The Dreamy Kid (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), and The Fountain (1926).

SCENE ONE

The firemen's forecastle of a transatlantic liner an hour after sailing from New York for the voyage across. Tiers of narrow, steel bunks, three deep, on all sides. An entrance in rear. Benches on the floor before the bunks. The room is crowded with men, shouting, cursing, laughing, singing—a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a sort of unity, a meaning— the bewildered, furious, baffled defiance of a beast in a cage. Nearly all the men are drunk. Many bottles are passed from hand to hand. All are dressed in dungaree pants, heavy ugly shoes. Some wear singlets, but the majority are stripped to the waist.

The treatment of this scene, or of any other scene in the play, should by no means be naturalistic. The effect sought after is a cramped space in the bowels of a ship, imprisoned by white steel. The lines of bunks, the uprights supporting them, cross each other like the steel framework of a cage. The ceiling crushes down upon the men's heads. They cannot stand upright. This accentuates the natural stooping posture which shoveling coal and the resultant over-development of back and shoulder muscles have given them. The men themselves should resemble those pictures in which the appearance of Neanderthal Man is guessed at. All are hairy-chested, with long arms of tremendous power, and low, receding brows above their small, fierce, resentful eyes. All the civilized white races are represented, but except for the slight differentiation in color of hair, skin, eyes, all these men art alike.

for goils and Dutchmen. Me for somep'n wit a kick to it! Gimme a drink, one of youse guys. (Several bottles are eagerly offered. He takes a tremendous gulp at one of them; then, keeping the bottle in his hand,

The curtain rises on a tumult of sound. YANK is seated in the foreground. He seems broader, fiercer, more truculent, more powerful, more sure of himself than the rest. They respect his superior strength-the grudging respect of fear. Then, too, he represents to them a self-glares belligerently at the owner, who hastens to

PADDY (blinking about him, starts to his feet resentfully, swaying, holding on to the edge of a bunk). I'm never too drunk to sing. 'Tis only when I'm dead to the world I'd be wishful to sing at all. (With a sort of sad contempt) "Whisky Johnny," ye want? A chanty, ye want? Now that's a queer wish from the ugly like of you, God help you. But no matther. (He starts to sing in a thin, nasal, doleful tone:)

Oh, whisky is the life of man!

Whisky! O Johnny! They all join in on this.)

Oh, whisky is the life of man!

Whisky for my Johnny! (Again chorus.)